Saisho
by Yesterday's Girl
Summary: He could still remember the first time he had ever killed a man. He could still remember, too, the first time he was on the receiving end of another man's blade. A look at some firsts for Himura Battousai during the Revolution and how they affected him.


Disclaimer: I do not own Rurouni Kenshin.

_Saisho _is Japanese for "first" or "beginning".

* * *

_Saisho_

He could still remember the first time he had ever killed a man.

It had been a moonless night in Kyoto, the stillness pressing in all around him, the darkness so thick and tangible he felt as if he were cutting it, too, with his blade before it met the heavy thud of human flesh. And then the scream echoed at him from infinite directions, horrible and primeval and pain-filled, reverberating off the shuttered buildings, and suddenly his hands were bathed in the warmth of blood that was darker even than the darkness surrounding him, soaking into the sleeves of his _uwagi_.

And it was then, as the body crumpled to the cold street and lay perfectly silent and still, did Kenshin realize he had been forever torn from the life he had lived until that moment. He had annihilated a man, and despite the fact that the man had been a loyalist to the shogunate, he had still been a man, and Kenshin was now responsible for his blood. It could not be undone. From that moment, Kenshin's life was divided in two; that which he had lived before he killed a man, and that which he lived after.

Later, after he had scrubbed the blood from his hands and clothing, he sipped a cup of tea in solitude under the soft glow of paper lanterns at the headquarters of the _ishin shishi_. As he lifted his cup to drink, the light aroma of jasmine swirling peacefully around him, he caught sight of the rust-colored residue of dried blood beneath his fingernails. He went to the well behind the inn and meticulously cleaned them, but he could not rid himself of the stains. Each night they returned, always darker than before.

He could still remember, too, the first time he was on the receiving end of another man's blade.

He had been drawn into a fight with the _Shinsengumi_ late one night after completing a job for the _ishin shishi_. Fatigued, he had let his opponent get too close. How he could have misjudged the attack, he did not know; the agony he felt as the blade ripped through the flesh of his abdomen was beyond anything he had ever experienced. His own blood, warm and wet, freely soaked the front of his _uwagi_. He had fallen to his knees, and for the first time was filled with a terror previously unknown to him – the paralyzing dread of inevitable doom that must have seized the hearts of every man he had killed during their last living moments.

Yet he had been spared. Other _ishin shishi_ had arrived, and Kenshin recalled the sounds of yelling and the clash of steel on steel, and of being hauled onto shoulders and carried.

Then he was writhing on a futon in a dimly-lit room, moaning and drooling and clenching his jaw as the feeling of dread remained. He kept clutching at his wound, trying to bring his knees to his chest, but there were hands holding him and voices conversing above him in varying volumes and tones of thinly-disguised fear.

Someone touched his wound and he would have screamed had the pain not made it so hard to breathe. Despite his terror that he would die, part of him wished for exactly that. He heard his own name – not the alias that had been given to him for his skill with a sword – but his own name, uttered soothingly somewhere nearby.

_Himura-san_.

There was a candle and a needle and thread and he could feel himself slowly being sewn together again. Then his _daisho_ were placed at his side and he was left to struggle with his maddening, near-intolerable pain alone.

It all became worse at night. The faces of the men he killed loomed in the darkness of his quarters and their blood spilled again and again in his mind's eye. Sleep frequently evaded him, and when he was finally able to rest out of sheer exhaustion, he was disturbed by nightmares that left him gasping and reaching for his swords. Sometimes he wept quietly, and he knew he wasn't the only one.

There were nights he barely slept at all, the restlessness making it impossible for him to lay down. Instead, he would huddle with his back to the wall, _katana _resting against his shoulder, and in those small hours he found it difficult not to despair. He looked at his _wakizashi_ for long intervals of time. His own life had become a trap; a dark room with no windows and no doors.

Yet with every rising sun flooding liquid fire over the mountains and rooftops, the _hitokiri_ went about his work, every bit the fearsome enigma the stories portrayed him as. The nightmares worsened, the stains darkened, but still he remained. He was, after all, a man who fought for an ideal.

_fin_


End file.
